The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The Connectivity Fault Management (CFM) protocol is an Ethernet service layer operations, administration and management (OAM) protocol that is specified in the IEEE 802.1ag-2007 standard. The CFM protocol provides: discovery and verification of the paths, through bridges and local area networks (LANs), taken for frames addressed to and from specified network nodes; detection of connectivity faults on the communication links that form the paths; and isolation of the connectivity faults to specific bridges or LANs. While the CFM protocol provides the operation, administration, and maintenance functions in terms of fault management and connectivity monitoring, the CFM protocol is provisioning-intensive because it requires manual configuration of an extensive list of parameters on every network node that is included in a CFM maintenance association.
For example, in order to provision the CFM protocol for a CFM association that includes multiple network elements, a user or application must login at each network element and must configure the necessary CFM parameters on each network element. Some examples of the CFM parameters that must be configured on each network element include, without limitation, a maintenance level, a maintenance association identifier, a maintenance endpoint identifier for the local network element, and the list of the maintenance endpoint identifiers of all other network elements that participate in the CFM association. For a CFM association that includes a large number of network elements, configuring the CFM protocol is a significant problem because each network element must be configured not only with its own CFM parameters, but also with CFM parameters that pertain to all other network elements that participate in the association. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the CFM protocol does not itself provide a mechanism for automatically maintaining the intended set of network elements that participate in an already established and functioning CFM association. Rather, when a network element is added to or is taken out of a CFM association for whatever reason, a user must manually reconfigure each and every other network element that participates in that CFM association. This manual maintenance of the set of network elements that participate in a CFM association is a tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming task, especially for CFM associations which include a large number of network elements and/or which experience frequent topology changes.